Hi fellows!

Here I present to you some information about Messier45 commonly known as Pleiades or Seven Sisters.

It is open star cluster containing over a 800 of stars* which some of them you can observe by your own eyes without using any specific equipment or telescope.
They are mainly young and hot stars, about 50 times younger than our Sun. Despite gravitational binding, like most open clusters they will not remain bound forever.

Since it's called young - the cluster is about 100 million years old so don't let that fool you, the Universe is much older so in comparision this star cluster is really young.

This star cluster is located in the Taurus (Bull)  constellation, at a distance of 136 parsecs which is around 444 light years from Earth. The visible brightness  from Earth is about 1.4 Magnitudo but in fact, the brightest stars of Messier45 are between 40-100 times brighter than our Sun.

The cluster includes stars such as Alcyone, Atlas, Pleione, Merope, Maia, Asterope, Sterope II, Celaeno, Taygeta and Electra, some of them are the brightest in their constellation.

They were also present in many mythologies such as mythical Greek Pleiades were daughters of the titan Atlas. They committed suicide when they heard about the death of their sisters, Hyades, so Zeus transferred their souls to the sky, creating 7 beautiful stars called the Seven Sisters. However, in Slavic mythology the Pleiades were named after the god Volos - the Children of Volos.


*Some calculations show a range between 500-1000 stars in this cluster.

All the photos belong to me, they were shot by using Slooh telescopes.
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